A recent development in the harvesting of seed cotton has been to incorporate a module former and module wrapping apparatus in the seed cotton boll harvesting machine, with the module former and module wrapping apparatus forming cotton collected from the boils into a large cylindrical module or bale and wrapping the module with a sheet of plastic wrapping material, for example, before the cotton module is ejected onto the ground. These modules are grouped or staged in the field, generally in end-to-end relationship to each other and in a number (usually four or more) equal to that required for loading a given transport truck or trailer used to transport the modules to the cotton gin. U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,650, granted 24 July 24, discloses a cotton harvester equipped with such a module former and module wrapping apparatus.
Once at the gin, it is necessary to remove the wrapping material from the module. A low cost means for removing the plastic wrapping material from the module is desired as part of processing the module on the feeder floor of the gin. While large gins may opt for a somewhat expensive automated means for removing the plastic wrap from the modules, in the case of smaller gins, there is a need for a lower cost means, including manual removal if such is of lower cost than the capital costs of installing machinery for automating the wrap removal step. U.S. Pat. No. 7,165,928, which was granted on 23 Jan. 2007, discloses a low cost wrap removal arrangement wherein a fork attachment is mounted to a loader boom structure of a front end loader, with the loader being operable to elevate a wrapped cylindrical cotton module and slit the bottom of the wrapper generally parallel to the longitudinal axis of the module by moving the loader and loaded module relative to a fixed knife located at one end of a roller conveyor forming the cotton feeder floor and with the fork attachment including a spear member which is inserted at the top of the module between the wrap and the module, whereby the plastic wrapper becomes suspended from the spear once cotton has flowed out through the slit cut in the bottom of the wrapper.
A further problem associated with removing wrapping material, as set forth in the aforementioned patent, is that when the module is wrapped, there is an inner tail section of the wrapping material which is not bonded to the next adjoining layer of the wrapping material. Thus, if this loose inner tail section of the plastic wrapping material is located at the bottom of the wrapped module when the wrapping material is cut during placement of the module on the conveying or feeder floor of the gin, then there is a likelihood that the loose inner tail section will be severed from the remainder of the wrapping material and fall onto the conveying floor with the cotton, thus contaminating the cotton that goes into the gin.
The problem to be solved then is to provide a way for ensuring that a wrapped module is properly oriented, prior to slitting the wrapper at the bottom of the module during depositing the module of cotton on the gin conveyor floor, so that the inner tail section of the wrapping material is displaced from the cutting zone and remains joined as a part of the wrapping material formerly encasing the cotton module.